(2019-03-22) Rao The Playflow Challenge

Venkatesh Rao: The Playflow Challenge. In the concluding essay of Breaking Smart Season 1, I quoted Seb Paquet's snowclone of Arthur C. Clarke's line about advanced technology being like magic: any sufficiently advanced kind of work is indistinguishable from play.

Just as the industrial age was full of "workflows" and philosophies of workflows like "Taylorism" and "Agile" and "Lean", the Digital Age needs playflows, and philosophies of playflows. These won't just happen by themselves. They need inventing.

I think I have a good handle on the right questions to ask. So for those of you interested in the future of work, here is something for you to think about: the playflow challenge.

...work becoming continuously challenging and therefore stimulating. Work requiring imagination. Work acquiring ludic qualities. Work fostering deep immersion (play ethic)

7/ In Mass Flourishing, Edmund Phelps shows, through arguments and empirical data, that people enjoy work when it has exactly these qualities. In industrial work, it is rare and limited to a privileged few most of the time

8/ To a significant extent, whether a behavior is work or play depends on the intent and attendant sensibility, not the artifacts or behaviors. It is play if you mean it as play. This does not mean it is not serious, or lacks harsh consequences for mistakes.

13/ Let's call a converged work-play behavior playflows, by analogy to workflow. To define a playflow, you not only have to define the behaviors and artifacts involved, but the attitudes and sensibilities that you need to bring to them, and methods to instill them.

The big conclusion I've reached so far is that play is a regime of behavior that can only exist between habits at one extreme, and projects on the other.

18/ The hard stuff is all in-between. We usually call them “processes” as in computation threads with foreground/background meta-states. These, as it happens, are the natural regime of play-like behaviors. Not all processes are play, but all play is process-based.

19/ Processes: a) have an evolving log-like state (long-term memory/history) b) repeat chaotically like a strange attractor so they are hard to make fully unconscious c) require frequent inspection, tuning and steering d) start once, terminate by fatal crash

20/ Play has these characteristics too. Specific games may end, but play in a domain is an indefinitely extended conscious behavior. Johan Huizenga's book Homo Ludens explores the play-like character inherent in all human activity. Highly recommended.

Play has a past and a future. It is not atemporal.

Habits on the other hand tend to zero marginal new information after a few iterations

Processes differ from projects in that they are self-perpetuating and termination is a pathology.

25/ Habits are learning projects. Other projects are “win to finish” finite games

27/ How are these modeled in workflow systems?

28/ The habit+project part of reading books is too trivial to track. The hard part is elsewhere. All the complexity is in what the GTD system labels the "Someday/Maybe" list.

the Someday/Maybe or equivalent list moves very slowly. Most Someday/Maybe items come from “play”, “meaning” or “enrichment” areas. You don’t someday/maybe do taxes or a work deliverable.

Now imagine a life where 90% of the energy is in processes like this and the project/habit parts are trivial.

35/ Further, imagine that these processes interact like in a distributed computing system, full of CAP theorem messiness. Your travel inspires your reading inspires your game design hobby inspires more travel. You want to keep this fertile reaction going. But not to the point where the energy dissipates.

36/ The playflow challenge is to design a system like GTD where “process” is the first class citizen, indefinitely extended memory is valuable, there are no due dates, nothing in particular must be done, and the governing spirit is play not work

can you make taking out the garbage a playflow? How about firefighting? Brain surgery?

39/ If you come up with a surgery protocol that handles more risky cases AND has a lower mortality rate, but looks like the surgical team is clowning around, you're going to have a problem selling it. A big part of play-flow convergence is leveling up the associated philosophy, cultural contextualization, and general literacy in understanding the "performance" properly.

41/ To help you, here is a set of tests your playflow design must pass: a) It must be applicable to multiple domains, at least one of which is a hard, serious-consequences domain b) It must induce ludic performance states in play-workers c) It must present a view to spectators that invites encouragement rather than resistance.